The reverse is true on other issues. We're much more sensitive about racial issues over here because of past slavery and discrimination, and a heterogenous society. Europe, on the other hand, although there's much migration lately, still has a per-country homogenous culture. Thus people in one country can talk about "those Turks" or "those French" without batting an eye, yet an American's ears would burn to hear that.
Sexual standards are like that, too. I was in Europe during the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing and none of the women at work understood why what he did was a big deal. They take it in stride; the US trains its people to be "exquisitely sensitive".
On the other hand, I recall fifteen years ago the prediction in some gaming magazine that the next year would see the rise of the professional video game player, and this was directed at arcade game players.
> He decided to wash his car on Sunday. The
> neighbors called the cops and he was given a
> ticket.
>
> Yup - you can't wash your friggin' car on Saturday > in Germany.
Europe holds their nose in the air about the death penalty because they have a long history of political abuse of it.
You can argue about the implementation quality (certainty of conviction, racial bias, etc.) but to argue it is an improper punishment for a murder is ludicrous.
Not only that, but they couldn't help but have incremental improvements on it, then when it is sent back again, have still further improvements on that, and so on.
Each loop, the one sent back is better than the one before...
Unless one loop cuts the chain, which must have happened.
> and realize it is going to take one massive
> paradigm shift before it's worth it's weight in shit
I think it's already happened. The problem with symbolic manipulation of the environment isn't the manipulation of the symbols, it's the creation of accurate symbols from external sensor data.
And that's just for moving around.
The other shift is realizing that, just maybe, there isn't any magic shortcut to intelligence in AI and that all humans are is a gigantic conglomeration of learned info, hence the Cyc project.
> Movies about robots help bring the debate to all levels of society.
The only movies I recall with AI that weren't silly were 2001 and "AI". (Sorry, "Short Circuit" and "Now I know why humans cry" are stupid in the AI department.)
Ironically, the Terminator series does show what could happen. A killer robot probably would not have to be build like a human, nor even be intelligent like a human. The ability to navigate over the terrain is the critical part. Once that is done, slap on a motion detector and a big saw and guns and toss them like popcorn at the enemy.
> Your freedom to do whatever you wants ends as soon
> as the neighbors object strenously enough
Therein lies all folly of mankind, all the way back to a hairy ape picking up a bone and clubbing his neighbor over the head to take his food.
Civilization is about removing that theft impulse from human interaction.
> And if I put up a fence around a pice of land
> that until I came along everyone hunted on, free
> of charge
Then the land belonged to those other people and you have no right to claim it. Of course, if it isn't in use, you do have that right.
> Show me one piece of land that had a title on it
> before the first property-rights believing
> person came along and murdered it's original
> occupants.
And the solution is to play word games that there is no ownership, yet still murder (or, in the powerful modern nation-state, simply threaten murder) the current occupents so you, cloaked in words of denial, can take control of the land (i.e. exercise property rights?)
Brilliant!
Pay no attention to the little man behind the screen. He isn't doing what humans have done throughout history. He isn't killing people so he can take their stuff and use it as his own property all the while claiming there is no property.
What is the important part about "property rights"?
It isn't a slip of paper sitting in a cabinet somewhere.
The important part is the disposal or use of the property as you see fit.
To say that you don't have the right to property is nonsensical because someone uses it; their very use is the exercising of property rights.
> If we, the people, determine that it is not, in
> fact, the most efficient or fairest way of
> allocating said resources, we have every right
> to ammend the rules.
Therein lies another error. My existance is not contingent on your, or you and a hundred million of your closest friends' permission to exist. If I need your permission, then I am not free.
People are trained from birth to believe in the Holy People, wherein that is merely an abstraction (via the vote) of might makes right.
Democracy is not what made this country great. Freedom is. By planting as the source of property rights "permission" by others you have created a monster whose actions are susceptible to the blathering of any of a number of power hungry individuals. The right to life, liberty, and property, and I mean the right, not the "permission" of some ghostly cloud of people out there, is what made this country great.
He's saying that it would have been funnier if you had inserted a fraction that wasn't a power of two, say, I'm 12/17th's Cherokee, precisely because 1. it can't happen in reality (upcoming genetic engineering withstanding, of course) and 2. it emphasizes the hacking of the db, whose interface to the government probably disallows that.
> No one has constitutional right to strike.
> Especially not government employees like teachers.
I'm a hardcore libertarian, but you sure do have the right to strike, because it's nothing more than quitting your job. You, and all your co-working buddies, are free to quit and hope that this cause such problems for the company that they will pay you more.
Where this goes wrong is when they keep adding dumb laws like "you can't strike" and simultaneously (increduously) "you can strike and force the company to give you your old job back when the strike is over".
1. Free speech is supressed with a clear conscience
2. This technology would still be 50-100 years or more in the future. You'd still be in a 5-10 year queue for a 13" B&W TV that would economically cost the state about $1000 and would only show state sponsored propaganda. Computer? That's the guy who whips up statistics about people dying in gulags.
It's also been pointed out that the importance of a job has nothing to do with the pay rate, nor should it. If importance were correlated with job, then one of the highest paid jobs would be garbage man.
This argument was actually made to the Supreme Court in the late '70's, IIRC, where nurses claimed that their pay should be above that of the hospital gardener, not below it.
Mercifully, the court did the right thing and rejected this nonsense.
I noted that, five years later, when there were nursing ads for $25/hour and up (mid 80's remember) that none of the nurses complained when supply and demand was working in their favor.
Slashdot Mirror
The reverse is true on other issues. We're much more sensitive about racial issues over here because of past slavery and discrimination, and a heterogenous society. Europe, on the other hand, although there's much migration lately, still has a per-country homogenous culture. Thus people in one country can talk about "those Turks" or "those French" without batting an eye, yet an American's ears would burn to hear that.
Sexual standards are like that, too. I was in Europe during the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing and none of the women at work understood why what he did was a big deal. They take it in stride; the US trains its people to be "exquisitely sensitive".
I don't know, some of the original Quake (I) ctf matches would have been much more rivetting than a card game.
"We now go back to Blue's flag area, where a quadded 8x has just cleared the base and stolen the flag...."
On the other hand, I recall fifteen years ago the prediction in some gaming magazine that the next year would see the rise of the professional video game player, and this was directed at arcade game players.
Still waiting...
> However, the US supreme court rulings mean dick all in Germany.
< a ObscureReference="On"> It's been awhile since we've sent a Supreme Court justice over there, hasn't it? </a>
> He decided to wash his car on Sunday. The
> neighbors called the cops and he was given a
> ticket.
>
> Yup - you can't wash your friggin' car on Saturday
> in Germany.
So his problem was...?
Europe holds their nose in the air about the death penalty because they have a long history of political abuse of it.
You can argue about the implementation quality (certainty of conviction, racial bias, etc.) but to argue it is an improper punishment for a murder is ludicrous.
Looking at the list of items that constitute the ranking, although "God" isn't a country, the Afterlife wouldn't rank too darned high...
> Then I can set my browser to avoid all .xxx sites
Sorry, your kids already probably know enuf to plug it into an anonymizing redirection service, or hell, babelfish for that matter.
> So every planet other than Earth (and the ice
> planet you mentioned in your post) is a "Somewhere
> in British Columbia" planet?
Much like the same parallel worlds where people in Chicago, Detroit, New York, et al. all drive by palm trees.
If the American Revolution were held today, we'd be talking about the freedom of bitstreams instead of speech...
> To the rest of us forcing women to cover their
> breasts on a beach is indecent.
Thanks. It took me 8 years to get over the sight of that 78-year old Italian woman on a Mediterranean beach.
Because flashing red lights remind people of their days in a brothel.
Dang, I've had this .sig for a couple of months now, and I'm disappointed it took this long to reel someone in.
Not only that, but they couldn't help but have incremental improvements on it, then when it is sent back again, have still further improvements on that, and so on.
Each loop, the one sent back is better than the one before...
Unless one loop cuts the chain, which must have happened.
> and realize it is going to take one massive
> paradigm shift before it's worth it's weight in shit
I think it's already happened. The problem with symbolic manipulation of the environment isn't the manipulation of the symbols, it's the creation of accurate symbols from external sensor data.
And that's just for moving around.
The other shift is realizing that, just maybe, there isn't any magic shortcut to intelligence in AI and that all humans are is a gigantic conglomeration of learned info, hence the Cyc project.
> Movies about robots help bring the debate to all levels of society.
The only movies I recall with AI that weren't silly were 2001 and "AI". (Sorry, "Short Circuit" and "Now I know why humans cry" are stupid in the AI department.)
Ironically, the Terminator series does show what could happen. A killer robot probably would not have to be build like a human, nor even be intelligent like a human. The ability to navigate over the terrain is the critical part. Once that is done, slap on a motion detector and a big saw and guns and toss them like popcorn at the enemy.
That could be a real danger in the future.
> Your freedom to do whatever you wants ends as soon
> as the neighbors object strenously enough
Therein lies all folly of mankind, all the way back to a hairy ape picking up a bone and clubbing his neighbor over the head to take his food.
Civilization is about removing that theft impulse from human interaction.
> And if I put up a fence around a pice of land
> that until I came along everyone hunted on, free
> of charge
Then the land belonged to those other people and you have no right to claim it. Of course, if it isn't in use, you do have that right.
> Show me one piece of land that had a title on it
> before the first property-rights believing
> person came along and murdered it's original
> occupants.
And the solution is to play word games that there is no ownership, yet still murder (or, in the powerful modern nation-state, simply threaten murder) the current occupents so you, cloaked in words of denial, can take control of the land (i.e. exercise property rights?)
Brilliant!
Pay no attention to the little man behind the screen. He isn't doing what humans have done throughout history. He isn't killing people so he can take their stuff and use it as his own property all the while claiming there is no property.
> that may have been built by an unknown human
> civilization thousands of years ago
Human civilization? That's pretty presumptuous of them.
What is the important part about "property rights"?
It isn't a slip of paper sitting in a cabinet somewhere.
The important part is the disposal or use of the property as you see fit.
To say that you don't have the right to property is nonsensical because someone uses it; their very use is the exercising of property rights.
> If we, the people, determine that it is not, in
> fact, the most efficient or fairest way of
> allocating said resources, we have every right
> to ammend the rules.
Therein lies another error. My existance is not contingent on your, or you and a hundred million of your closest friends' permission to exist. If I need your permission, then I am not free.
People are trained from birth to believe in the Holy People, wherein that is merely an abstraction (via the vote) of might makes right.
Democracy is not what made this country great. Freedom is. By planting as the source of property rights "permission" by others you have created a monster whose actions are susceptible to the blathering of any of a number of power hungry individuals. The right to life, liberty, and property, and I mean the right, not the "permission" of some ghostly cloud of people out there, is what made this country great.
No.
He's saying that it would have been funnier if you had inserted a fraction that wasn't a power of two, say, I'm 12/17th's Cherokee, precisely because 1. it can't happen in reality (upcoming genetic engineering withstanding, of course) and 2. it emphasizes the hacking of the db, whose interface to the government probably disallows that.
> Indian data [on insecure servers]
and
> The site www.doi.gov is running Apache
Anyone else find that a bit odd?
> Like the "No Parking" sign in St. Louis on an interstate stretch
Do not underestimate people's stupidity. I've seen people changing a tire in the fast lane around a bend in a highway.
> No one has constitutional right to strike.
> Especially not government employees like teachers.
I'm a hardcore libertarian, but you sure do have the right to strike, because it's nothing more than quitting your job. You, and all your co-working buddies, are free to quit and hope that this cause such problems for the company that they will pay you more.
Where this goes wrong is when they keep adding dumb laws like "you can't strike" and simultaneously (increduously) "you can strike and force the company to give you your old job back when the strike is over".
> A) If this were a Communist country
then we wouldn't be reading this because
1. Free speech is supressed with a clear conscience
2. This technology would still be 50-100 years or more in the future. You'd still be in a 5-10 year queue for a 13" B&W TV that would economically cost the state about $1000 and would only show state sponsored propaganda. Computer? That's the guy who whips up statistics about people dying in gulags.
It's also been pointed out that the importance of a job has nothing to do with the pay rate, nor should it. If importance were correlated with job, then one of the highest paid jobs would be garbage man.
This argument was actually made to the Supreme Court in the late '70's, IIRC, where nurses claimed that their pay should be above that of the hospital gardener, not below it.
Mercifully, the court did the right thing and rejected this nonsense.
I noted that, five years later, when there were nursing ads for $25/hour and up (mid 80's remember) that none of the nurses complained when supply and demand was working in their favor.